For Korea efforts to achieve well-function e-courts started in the late 1970s, when visionary judges sought to create an orderly database of cases flowing through court. After a group of judges stared recording some cases on floppy disks, in 1979 the judiciary contacted the Korea Institute of Science and Technology to study the feasibility of electronic judicial proceedings. Convinced of the benefits of using information technology in courts, judges started creating more advanced databases and developing case management software.
Before word processing software was introduced in the early 1980s, Korean judges faced challenges such as writing judgments by hand and otherwise dealing with paper-based system.
In 1986 the case management system was launched. This platform enabled internal court users such as clerks and judges to search all civil cases in the database. It was not easy to convince court users to change how they worked.